Vandals parading as anarchists are such a threat we have to surrender the Bill of Rights.

“The best defense against all manners of terrorist threats, Islamist-inspired or otherwise, is to stop them before they occur by developing and maintaining effective counterterrorism, intelligence, and information-sharing programs. Thus, by employing an all-threats approach to counterterrorism, the Department of Homeland Security can protect against the many varied terrorist threats posed against the U.S.,” writes Jessica Zuckerman for the Heritage Foundation.

In fact, minus the FBI’s involvement, the motley crew arrested earlier this week would have not secured what they thought was a bomb and would have remained little more than a nuisance along with other so-called “anarchists,” who are in fact property vandals with vague and confused anarcho-communist ideas of smashing capitalism and confronting the police (who they often work for).

Not surprisingly, the neocons at the Heritage Foundation remain focused on supposed Islamic terror despite overwhelming evidence that the vast majority of supposed Islamic plots in the United States are shepherded by the FBI. In fact, Islamic terror ranks low on the list of threats facing Americans (they are more likely to fall victim to tornados, lightning, floods, swimming and automobile accidents, and other mundane yet tragic occurrences that claim tens of thousands of lives every year in the United States).

In February, a North Carolina research group concluded that homegrown terrorism by radicalized Muslim Americans is a distant threat at best. Of about 14,000 murders in the United States last year, not a single one resulted from Islamic extremism, according to Charles Kurzman, the author of the report for the Triangle Center on Terrorism and Homeland Security. In fact, the threat of Islamic-inspired terrorism has declined since September 11, 2001.

The FBI is the main progenitor of Islamic terrorist threats in the United States. “Critics say the FBI is running a sting operation across America, targeting – to a large extent – the Muslim community by luring people into fake terror plots,” a report posted by the Guardian noted last year.

“FBI agents and informants target not just active jihadists, but tens of thousands of law-abiding people, seeking to identify those disgruntled few who might participate in a plot given the means and the opportunity. And then, in case after case, the government provides the plot, the means, and the opportunity,” Trevor Aaronson wrote last year for Mother Jones.

The Heritage Foundation supports this highly dubious form of entrapment masquerading as counterterrorism. In order to “protect against all threats,” including clueless wanna-be anarchists, the outfit funded by CIA operative Scaife would like to see the unconstitutional Patriot Act continue indefinitely. It also supports building a “domestic counterterrorism framework,” in other words the high-tech police state surveillance network now going into place.

Since its inception, the FBI has served as the establishment’s political police apparatus, a fact revealed in the mid-70s during the Senate’s Church Committee hearings that stripped the veneer off COINTELPRO, the FBI’s covert war against political enemies of the state.

It is no mistake the FBI’s bust of supposed anarchists in Cleveland was timed to coincide with events planned for May Day by the Occupy Wall Street movement. Since all efforts to compromise and break the movement and turn it into a harmless cheering section for the Democrat party failed – in much the same way the Republicans domesticated the Tea Party – the political elite have resorted to Plan B: destroying the movement from the inside out. The FBI bust and subsequent corporate media coverage demonizing anarchism (which most Americans know almost nothing about) and linking it to OWS is behavior right out of the COINTELPRO handbook.

Considering the level of political disenchantment and disenfranchisement in America, it will be difficult for the government to take down the OWS movement. This will not, however, prevent the FBI – and the Department of Homeland Security, the latest appendage of the national security state – from continuing its effort to destroy more radical elements (for instance, activists who are determined to end the Federal Reserve) and roll the rest into the establishment’s political tent.